Ah, skeuomorphism - my favourite punching bag. Austin Carr has spoken to former Apple designers and people within the company, and they're all confirming there's a rift within Cupertino between people who want to move away from skeuomorphism, and people who want to retain it as much as possible, and even want to expand it. Since I've long hoped for Apple to ditch this "visual masturbation", as one former Apple designer calls it, I'm happy to learn not the entire company supports skeuomorphism.

There are concepts like flipping a page (with gestures) where skeuomorphism may work, but when I first saw calendar or address book in Lion I just thought that it is the most ugly piece of UI I ever!
Young generations will grow up without traditional (paper) calendars or address books, so there is absolutely no need to mimic these.
When I see the latest OS releases from Apple I always feel the same:
- most times easy to learn
- but not easy to use (no short cuts, wrong assumptions about how power users are working)
In the old days the UI balance from Apple was much better.

There are concepts like flipping a page (with gestures) where skeuomorphism may work

No, not even that. Flip back and the analogy falls apart (in a book, does flipping right the right-hand page brings back the left-hand page?). It also muddles the message that a digital book is not a real one, it has many digital-only features, such as the ability to resize and change fonts.

Not to mention that all those animations and other bling bling are sucking ever more power when one is running battery. While i don't care for the metro UI I can see why they got rid of Aero, first thing I did on my netbook was kill the thing and you can tell a difference as far as how long the battery lasts.

To me the best way to look at UI design is this: Does this make it easier and quicker for the user? Does this give an actual benefit to the user and help them perform a task? if the answer to any of the above is no? Toss it.